Music Feature

Free Range Thinking: Interview With Comedian Robert Dubac

Robert Dubac closes a special 4-week engagement at Ambler's Act II Playhouse.

Robert Dubac would like to draw
your attention to something. It’s a pattern he’s noticed of late in the titles
of some leading news anchors’ flagship shows: “’Geraldo at Large’ is a comment
on an ego, ‘Nancy Grace’ has none… Anderson Cooper 360? Doesn’t that mean he
talks in circles?”

Clearly, it’s
getting to be a problem.

But what does this
crazy society look like from the outside? What if someone came along, oblivious
to all the hype, spin, and weasel words we deal with daily, and happened upon
our alarmist lifestyle? What would it look like to them?

That’s what Mr.
Dubac is trying to explore in his new show, Free
Range Thinking, which ran most recently during a special four-week engagement at Ambler's Act II Playhouse. “People don’t
like to be preached to unless they’re laughing. We’re so bombarded with false
information these days, it’s time we think out of the box… [Free Range Thinking] is about taking a
point of view with the media, and running with it.”

In the case of his
new show, that point of view comes from a nameless man with amnesia, who finds
himself stuck in our modern era of media inundation with no landmarks, no
background, and no way out.

When asked about
the use of language in his comedy, Dubac remarked, “Language is so hypocritical
and abstract… No one is comfortable with nuance! [The difference between
comedians and monologuers is] comedians will spend hours deciding whether to
use ‘the’ or ‘a’ in a joke.

Although a veteran
of stand-up comedy, having appeared regularly on Craig Ferguson’s The Late Late Show, Dubac says he prefers
performing his own work in a theater to the more traditional stand-up “…because there’s a beginning, a middle, and
an end… [and] no one realizes they’re pissed off till they’re driving home.”

A student of the
great Stanford Meisner, whom Dubac refers to as “a crabby old guy, but a
brilliant teacher,” Dubac firmly believes that anything done onstage must be
done under imaginary circumstances. For him, “Free Range Thinking is about what’s real and what isn’t.”